Tuesday, July 10, 2018

NSA deleting millions of unwarranted call records

July 3, 2018 - "The National Security Agency (NSA) has announced that it is deleting millions of phone and text records it has gathered since 2015, because it is holding a bunch of records it was not supposed to have....

"In this case, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act in 2015 to better control (and potentially limit) the NSA's access to the metadata (that is, everything but the conversations' actual content) of Americans' communications. This reform was part of a backlash against the mass surveillance exposed by Edward Snowden, and the bill was passed after some privacy-minded lawmakers, such as Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), forced a part of the Patriot Act to expire that was being used to justify mass amounts of domestic snooping.

"Under the USA Freedom Act, the NSA no longer collects and combs through our communications metadata itself. Instead it now has to request records from telecommunications companies using strictly defined search terms....

"The problem, as Charlie Savage of The New York Times uncovered, is that the telecom companies were accidentally sending too many records in response to NSA requests. And so the agency was receiving private personal information about Americans' communications data that it neither asked for nor had the right to examine:

"As a result, when the agency then fed those phone numbers back to the telecoms to get the communications logs of all of the people who had been in contact with its targets, the agency also gathered some data of people unconnected to the targets. And so the agency was receiving private personal information about Americans' communications data that it neither asked for nor had the right to examine....
'If the first information was incorrect, even though on its face it looked like any other number, then when we fed that back out, by definition we'd get records back on the second hop that we did not have authority to collect,' [an NSA spokesman] said....

"The NSA requested more than 500 million telecom records just last year. It is unable to determine which records it has the authorization to collect, so it is purging all of them....

"Many of the same privacy-minded lawmakers who managed to force some of the surveillance authorities of the Patriot Act to expire also opposed the USA Freedom Act. Congressmen like Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), and Jared Polis (D-Colo.) voted against the bill because they believed it still gave the government too much power to collect our records without warrants. Sen. Paul rejected the USA Freedom Act for the same reason....